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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

They've had these forever. They're just not always on the shelves (but nothing is).

These meals also don't seem all that nutritious. A lot of the entrees are high in carbs but low in proteins and fats (affecting satiety and probably long term muscle mass that you'd need to fight off the zombies). Also not sure about their micronutrient profiles. Doesn't matter for 10 days but hard to survive long term with.

Something like Huel or Soylent offers way more consistent meal to meal nutrition for a little more money (double the price per serving, around $4 instead of $2). Not sure about the shelf life though.

Your local food co-op probably also sells bulk dehydrated hearty soups and meal mixes in powder form. Or get MREs from military surplus stores.

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I would assume that, for apocalypse purposes, these kinds of supplies aren't meant as a long-term meal solution so much as a supplemental or "bridge" food source to use while you work on establishing a new food supply? In which case convenience and shelf stability probably is more important than hitting an optimal nutrient profile for long-term health.

Soylent and Huel both only claim around a year of shelf life, hardly in the same category. Whether that means actual degradation in their nutrient content or just taste/texture is a different story.

I let some Huels sit around for about 9 months and they got very nasty.

>These meals also don't seem all that nutritious. A lot of the entrees are high in carbs but low in proteins and fats

Uh, of course? That's the stuff that keeps on the shelf. The point of disaster preparation is to avoid burning cash on throwing your food out every six months or hitting the expiry while you possibly don't even have running water if you forget when rotation day is. It's not a luxury athletics product; it's meant to keep you and your family supplied with calories for a week after an earthquake takes out the interstate your supermarket gets its deliveries on and there is no food to be had at any price. Do you have any actual experience with disaster planning? This comment is wildly off the mark.

Nope, not at all! We do cycle through bags of the fake food though, so shelf life isn't really an issue. We eat then normally and if the power goes out for a few days/weeks we can still keep eating them. If it's longer than that the preppers are gonna kill and eat us anyway, so shrug.

Personal fantasies are an exveptionally poor excuse for handing out known bad advice.

It's not advice? Just discussing something I thought was interesting.

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